I think that the game industry includes their "extras" in more of an effort to reduce second-hand sales, in which the store makes a ton of profit while screwing the developers and consumers. That's why you'll see things like one-time downloadable content codes packaged with new games. The video game industry has done a pretty good job of thwarting piracy at a technical level. Yes, you can play pirated games if you void your warranty, but the mainstream players aren't going to do that (especially when it's such a huge risk on platforms like the XBox 360)

carbon dating is not used to date ice cores or live specimens. It is only used to date decaying organic matter

the first part of that is true, microbes are found in nearly every extreme environment known to us. However, the same microbes are not found in all (and in most cases even > 1) of these environments, and a great number of them can't survive "normal" conditions. It is extremely likely (though not guaranteed) that a microbe that is suited to survive frozen for that amount of time would be killed by the temperature, PH balance, etc. of the human body

... welcome our standards-compliant overlords (and it's about damn time)

Actually, the point I was going for is that it does not "work against" evolution, because evolution is merely the process of reaction to selective forces, so I'll agree with you that I may have mis-worded what I was trying to say.

it wouldn't be, but that's not the situation. We are not altering genetics, we are selecting which embryo to implant based on the embryos' genetics. If this is done enough times, certain "unfavorable" alleles may get completely erased from our gene pool. In that case, this process is unable to bring those traits back

While the physical characteristics may not be necessary, sometimes genes can interact with each other in complex and unforeseeable ways. For instance, people who carry the sickle-cell gene are immune to malaria. It is not entirely unimaginable that a disease could exist that kills everyone except people with brown hair and brown eyes (perhaps a bacteria that is sensitive to high levels of melanin). If that disease strikes a population that has artificially selected against brown hair and brown eyes, the effect would be devastating

C+H touched on a similar subject last week

I think what you meant is that it works against the process of natural selection. Any selective process, including this type of artificial selection, furthers evolution, but in this case "fit to survive" means "able to pass the screening process." The example you chose, while still a very real concern, less to do with evolution than with genetic diversity, which, as you imply, is very important to the survival of the species should our environment change violently

considering your comment, you have the single most appropriate sig I have ever seen. For those who can't see it / in case it changes:

are book reviews news?

that's why I bought 10 pieces of hardware before connecting my computer in my home office to the internet. I think the issue ends up being scalability vs. robustness

and objects can only be one of 3 colors, can only have one of 2 temperatures, and can coexist in the same place as another object provided the color and/or temperature differs

that might be difficult, considering a common rule is that you may not have any metal or hard objects (hard plastic knee braces, etc)

this works on Windows, too. Well, not chmod and all that, but I recently jar'd up a small, headless java app that I was able to put on the desktop and double click it to run it.

the entire point of java is to take the platform out of the equation. If somebody develops an app that works on one platform and not on another (not due to e.g. some hardcoded platform-specific filename, etc.), then he has just done Sun a favor by pointing out a bug in Java for one platform or the other. I don't know much about JavaME, but the above holds true for personal computers

package managers are great in most cases, as long as you don't care about configuration. But, for example, try installing Tomcat 6 on Ubuntu with the package manager and see if you can even find the actual location of the config files. By contrast, downloading the .tar.gz and extracting the files yourself is quick, easy, and straightforward